Global Email Users, Traffic Forecast to Continue Growing

Email may not be growing at the same rate as social media or messaging platforms, but it’s still chugging along, according to a new annual forecast [pdf] from The Radicati Group. Globally, there are an estimated 3.7 billion email users this year, a number that is predicted to grow by 3% per year through 2021, when it will exceed 4.1 billion.

Daily email traffic is expected to grow at a slightly faster rate, as both business and consumer emails increase by 4% annually through the forecast period, from 269 billion daily emails this year to 320 billion in 2021.

That suggests that this year email traffic will average 72 daily emails per user, with that figure growing to 77 per user in 2021.

Finally, email market revenues are projected to show strong growth, increasing by 22% next year to almost $30 billion and maintaining double-digit gains through the forecast period to nearly $47 billion in 2021.

The email market is composed of 5 segments: enterprise messaging platforms from vendors such as IBM and Microsoft; messaging platforms for service providers such as Open-Xchange and Oracle; cloud business email; email clients; and consumer email.